Before Binbin Wang’s Mitacs-Accelerate internship with energy company Nexen Inc., he knew “next to nothing” about crude oil trading.  In four short months, under the guidance of Dr.

For Oleksandr Romanko of McMaster University’s Department of Computing and Software, a postdoctoral fellowship through Mitacs Elevate helped him to transition to the world of risk analytics when he was hired as a full time Research Analyst this summer by IBM.

Optimization techniques, an emerging innovation, can serve as one of the tools for financial institutions and companies to find better solutions and improve decision-making. With this focus, Mitacs Elevate Fellow Oleksandr Romanko created an industry-academic event called ‘Optimization in Finance and Risk Management’.  

Held in Toronto just this past month, the 2-day workshop aimed to bridge the gap between academic research in optimization and practical financial and risk management applications of optimization techniques.